* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

One UI to end gropes: Samsung facelift crowns your thumb the king

Dave 126 Silver badge

TouchWiz isn't what it used to be. I was wary of Samsung but my S8's version of Android is good, and I say that coming from Sony phones (close to stock) and Nexus (stock).

Xiaomi anarchy in the UK: Chinese tat-flinger wants to slip its cheapo flagships in Brit pockets

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: So....?

If data privacy is your chief concern, maybe don't look at Android at all?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Why the mattress hang up?

I've seen foam mattresses for sale in the UK that state that they need to be aired for a few days after unpacking. It doesn't seem that odd for Xiaomi to advertise that their mattresses doesn't vent nasty gasses, especially if some of their competitors do.

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "An external drive [...] with the bottleneck that brings."

>Using Thunderbolt, eSATA or USB 3.x is not really a bottleneck - especially when you maybe work on a stylish PC which can't really be expanded despite its price...

Exactly, the entire rationale of the Trashcan Mac Pro was that it doesn't store much data internally but instead supplies a load of Thunderbolt 3 ports so that your work is accessed from external redundant storage. It's 1TB PCIe SSD is just for your current session. With an hourly Time Machine back up you will never lose more than an hour's work even if you were to accidently throw it out the window.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Man...

I was reading about a film crew's work flow (sports videos) and it involved the raw footage going straight to two drives from the RED camera, and then being copied to more Thunderbolt drives on site. The team would always make sure that they took at least two hotel rooms, with at least one copy of the footage in each.

Samsung 'reveals' what looks like a tablet that folds into a phone, but otherwise we're quite literally left in the dark

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Alternative

There have been phones with projectors in the past but really the projector is better as a discrete gadget. Of those who would find a projector occasionally useful, only a small fraction would need it so often that they'd want it integrated into their phone. It'd be far more useful to connect to it by cable or WiFi when required - if only so that you can use the phone to line up content without knocking the projector out if alignment with whatever you've pointed it at.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why?

> Given that the current vibe is firmly in the 2:1 aka "letterbox" arena, why should anyone want to fold it out square?

The 2:1 vibe is just a function of phone width being a limiting factor. This is why tablets aren't 2:1 and neither are most monitors (unless they've been specifically chosen for gaming or watching cinema aspect ratios.)

Dave 126 Silver badge

What exactly would be the advantage of a foldable or roll-up desktop monitor be?

I can just about envisage a laptop based on this model - a flexible display would mean a 13" 16:10 laptop could fit in a jacket pocket (albeit an easy target for a pickpocket).

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: This

Actually mobile phones have moved towards a 2:1 aspect ratio because it makes reading websites easier (less scrolling required) given that the chief limiting factor is the *width* of a phone. Video playback isn't the only concern for most phone users. However, video playback is likely the main use for cheap n cheerful Android 16:9 tablets.

When the limitation of fitting in a trouser pocket is removed, we have the 4:3 iPad mini (jacket pocket or handbag) or iPad (coffee table).

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why Linux on Apple Hardware?

> There's a laptop with 16:10??? Where!!

Shit, I feel terrible now for misremembering and getting your hopes up.

Huawei Matebook Pro is 3:2, like MS's offerings. Sorry again, I thought it was 16:10. Still, discrete Nvidia GPU etc .

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Great plan Timmy.

> Still, if a user can configure it so, then presumably malware could (in principal) do so also as a prelude for some kind of boot-time attack.

I guess a hardware switch or jumper could allow a user to do things that malware can't. Still, as you say, it's not worth the effort.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why Linux on Apple Hardware?

There was once a time when the MacBook Air didn't have any non Apple equivilents for several years And it suited Linus Torvalds - light and quiet being his priorities. At the time he lamented Apple's competitors for not being able to release a similar machine.

These days he uses a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, but likes the look of offerings from Lenovo too.

Non Apple Laptop vendors have really upped their game in recent years, with high Res screens (sometimes s 16:10 or 4:3, at last) and track pads which aren't terrible.

Russian computer failure on ISS is nothing to worry about – they're just going to turn it off and on again

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Could be worse

HAL's behaviour wasn't a malfunction as such, it was the result of secretive humans adding orders at a late stage; the result would have been the same had there been three HALs on board.

Arthur C Clarke stressed the importance of triple systems in Rendezvous with Rama.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Which computers is this?

The computer which failed is a part of the ISS, and not a laptop.

The laptops interfacing with the ISS systems are Linux based, both the American and Russian ones. Then there are some European and Japanese laptops. The rest are running Windows:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/12/05/how-are-laptops-used-on-the-international-space-station/#41ef24317e5d

iPhone XR, for when £1,000 is just too much for a smartmobe

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Weak reception is a serious fault

I've heard anecdotes of weak reception on iPhones. I went for a walk in the woods with an iPhone 5S owner the other day, and my Exonys Galaxy S8 seemed to give up the 4G around the same time.

I wish there was an app to make my dad aware of the signal level in his phone - he's very fond of ringing me up when he's in a granite-walled bar with the inevitable result that he sounds as if he's in the drink.

Has science gone too far? Now boffins dream of shining gigantic laser pointer into space to get aliens' attention

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Not a brilliant idea

Indeed. The Dark Forest view dictates that we be destroyed casually.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: We are here, please exterminate us!

They wouldn't destroy us for resources, they would destroy us because they cannot be sure we won't destroy them.

Dave 126 Silver badge

The Dark Forest

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_dangerous_to_communicate

The Fermi paradox is "where the hell is everybody in this near infinite universe?". A possible answer is that everybody is hiding, since the only prudent course of action is to terminate with extreme prejudice any civilization you come into contact with. Even a technically inferior species should be wiped out, since their technology could advance rapidly in the blink of an eye over the timescales this game is being played.

The Dark Forest is the sequal to The Three Body Problem by Chinese sci fi author Liu Cixin. In his scenario, Earth advertising itself with a laser is akin to a naked infant dancing by a campfire in a dark forest full of hidden predators, who will dispassionately and efficiently destroy us as a matter of course.

Slabs, huh, what are they are good for? Er, not quite absolutely nothing

Dave 126 Silver badge

Yet damn near every big TV sold today has 3D functionality - it's usually a by product of the high refresh rate used by the image processing gubbins, so 3D doesn't add to the cost.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Windows-10-nic

I'd assumed he meant Windows-10-nik, as in Beatnik, Sputnik or Refusenik - the "nik" suffix denoting someone associated with the thing in question. From the Russian Yiddish.

Boom! Just like that the eSIM market emerges – and jolly useful it is too

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Apple added a secondary eSIM slot

No, there's one just SIM slot (except in Chinese model). The eSIM doesn't go in a slot.

Here's iFixit confirming that there's just one SIM slot on non Chinese iPhones:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+XS+and+XS+Max+Teardown/113021

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: How do they get away with...

A PC isn't fast enough to render a CGI movie either - see 'render farm' , a rack or room of racks contains CPU/GPUs.

Dave 126 Silver badge

>Also it would probably help to put the brains in the keyboard part rather than the screen

The 'brains' of an iPad weigh very little. The battery probably accounts for a fair fraction though.

The MS Surface Book approach was to place a second battery in the keyboard section for the weight balance reasons you outline.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Milspec

One assumes they drop a load of iPads to empirically determine how much force they can withstand before breaking, then calculate how much polyurethane case to enclose an iPad in to meet their specifications.

Otter Box started out making flight cases to house military kit before they used their reputation to flog phone cases.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: CAD ... is suited to being run in the cloud

> Real cost, privacy, security, availability

For an engineering company, the issues of cost, security and availability are *exactly* why they would want their CAD models to sit on their own cloud hosted on their premises, with engineers accessing them via a terminal, X Windows, a browser, whatever. This means their IP doesn't have to leave the premises, and isn't stuck on an individual workstation inaccessible to colleagues.

You're a lone wolf, I get it, but most engineering projects involve professionals from various disciplines working together.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Future ARM laptops

>Being able to drag around the 3D model of sprocket (fine, three sprockets) in a browser window may be good enough for the 3D-printer-happy "maker" generation but is not something I would call CAD software

@Dropbear. I wasn't for a moment suggesting the CAD software run on ARM, merely that it doesn't matter if the *terminal* runs on ARM. The CAD model itself is running on a load of Xeon in the cloud ( or on your local network) the terminal just needs to accept user input and display the workspace.

Back in the nineties we were using CAD software on a UNIX mainframe accessed through X-Windows from a terminal - before it was practical for standalone workstations.

Conceptually this was no different to accessing computer resources on the cloud. The geographical location of where the model is being processed with respect to the user has absolutely *nothing* to do with how many components, sprockets or otherwise, can be in the model.

CAD can be very resource intensive, especially the kinetic simulations you're attempting. That's *exactly* why Fusion 360 and others work with Amazon Web Services - to bring you even more RAM and processing power than you can fit in your desk. The alternative is to buy your own CPU/GPUs, but then you have to use them enough to justify the investment.

Simulations, like renderings, are a good example of a task that doesn't require human input whilst then computer is crunching the numbers. Depending on which package you're using, you might find that it allows you to install clients on your other machines on your local network so that their CPU/GPUs can be harnessed to speed up the calculations.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Future ARM laptops

> Speaking as an experienced design engineer, there's a lot of IO on big CAD models. You can take my machine with 3 SSDs, 26 cores and 128GB of memory from my cold, dead hands

The model is big, but it can worked on remotely - the only data travelling between your terminal and mainframe (or cloud) is user input and video output. Indeed, for bigger models than your's (think of visual effects studios) a render farm of clustered resources is used.

It's not for everybody, but in many circumstances a cloud CAD instance is suitable - plus you can rent more CPU/GPU power as you need it. Then of course there are the collaborative working methods common in many industries - colleagues need to work with changes you've made in real time, so having a model stuck on an individual workstation is not ideal (though there are ways of just uploading your changes rather than the entire model)

By contrast, dumping a day's shoot of 4K footage up to a cloud is impractical over most broadband connections.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: iPad Pro

Indeed, just as the weight reduction will aid users with arthritis. Design for a wide range of people is called Universal Design, and with the demographics of wealthy nations a company would be stupid to not implement it.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Not either/or

> No hard core professional considers the iPad Pro to be remotely a replacement

Not a replacement, but a complement to a Mac for some workflows, just as a Wacom graphics tablet complements a Mac. It should be clear that Apple would like you to buy a Mac *and* an iPad.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Not just hipsters I'm afraid

It's been a surprisingly persistent myth that only hipsters use MacBooks - it might just be that they are the most visible users in coffee bars. Generally the baby boomer generation has more money, and it should be clear its a demographic group Apple have always aimed at, regardless of their advertising.

For your camera club, the Windows ecosystem was a bit late to support a few important things for photography though they're now mostly fixed. First, traditionally Macs had colour management, then Windows caught up. Then OSX had better support for high resolution monitors, then Windows caught up but Adobe dragged its feet (so that Photoshop would have ridiculously small UI elements on high Res displays). Macs had 16:10 displays whereas PCs fell almost universally into 16:9, until the Surface range helped prompt PC vendors into producing laptops with 3:2 screens.

In fairness to Microsoft they evidently now know what is required (the colour accuracy of their Surface Pro is highly praised, stylus support is good, resolution very high, aspect ratio is useful), but in the last decade there have been times when their software and hardware partners have been slow to wake up.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Future ARM laptops

> Autodesk already have a full 3d cad running in the browser.

Exactly. So do OnShape, using a desktop or Android app as a client. This is important because if it works as advertised I'm no longer tied to any platform - a Linux laptop or Chromebook becomes a viable option. Even MacOSX doesn't have all the main CAD packages available for it, such as Solidworks ( which package a company uses is often determined by its clients and suppliers).

It's worth noting that CAD (unlike video editing with its high IO demands) is suited to being run in the cloud - its descended from the mainframe / terminal model, multiple engineers may be accessing the same model simultaneously, and models hold commercially sensitive information that's best not held on laptops floating about the place.

Whilst charging customers per month is appealling to CAD vendors, it does open the door to competition who might charge per task, or per hour, which would work out cheaper for smaller companies for whom CAD is only a part of their work flow.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "as fast as the fastest PCs."

@ Steve Todd

Quite right, there have been technical challenges, and Intel's difficulty in moving to a smaller process size has been well reported. My point largely stands though; being 'as fast as the fastest PC' [at some tasks] isn't that high a bar. The amount of money Intel throws at solving their technical issues is determined by the market though, and if gamers are advised that most games don't benefit from anything faster than a Core i5 (since the game engines have evolved with GPUs) then the demand for high end CPUs isn't as high as it might otherwise be.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Pocket Rocket

The last Mac Pro was very much tuned at a workflow that wasn't coding - ie, video editing and thus shunting a lot of data very quickly and frequently between onboard and redundant off board storage. That use case is almost the last justification for a workstation, since other workflows such as CAD or animation can just have a GPU farm steered by a modest desktop.

Which is a long way of agreeing with you; it's hard to see what next year's Mac Pro will do for you over a Mac Mini. Tim Cook says it will be modular, but ultimately how much power do you need on your desk before building a render farm out of commodity hardware seems like a good idea?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Future ARM laptops

I'm watching all of this with interest, including Chromebooks. My laptop was fast enough for the level of CAD work I was doing years back, provided I didn't mind waiting a few minutes for a render (which I only rarely needed to do). Therefore any new machine has not been a necessity, and I can watch these platforms - iPad Pro, Win 10 on Surface, Chromebooks - develop with disinterst.

Back in the day I had no choice over my platform - CAD software essentially dictated I used an Intel Windows machine.

Features that were available but exotic a few years back, such as good stylus support, high Res displays, external GPUs, an alternative CPU architecture - are now or are becomming mainstream.

What my mobile workstation may be in a few years time I really don't know. It would be interesting if Photoshop or a similarly polished and featured alternative was available for ChromeOS.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "as fast as the fastest PCs."

Relax, we don't know the context of the "as fast as the fastest PC" quote - the exec might have describing the speed of performing a particular quick task in Photoshop or iMovie or something. Desktop CPUs haven't been getting much faster at single thread tasks in recent years anyway - because they've been fast enough, focus has been on improving energy efficiency and or just adding more cores.

What Apple actually displayed as a bullet point was 'Faster then 92% of the notebook computers available last year" which Anandtech find very plausible:

Apple mentioned during the keynote that the new A12X is more powerful than 92% of the available laptops in the market, which isn’t very surprising given the performance levels we saw on the A12.

- https://www.anandtech.com/show/13529/apple-announces-new-ipad

Chuck this on expenses: £2k iPad paints Apple as the premium fondleslab specialist – as planned

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Crippled I/O? Won't support external hard drives?

If it was being pitched as a Mac replacement this would be an issue, but they're not - they're designed to complement a Mac workflow.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> FAIL Two grand and it can't open two word document simultaneously? For a 'pro' tool that's pretty much fuck all use isn't it?

Not if the professional in question is using Photoshop with a stylus. In other news, Land Rovers make shit minibuses, Nissan Micras aren't very fast and Lamborghinis have rubbish fuel economy.

With the 6T, OnePlus hopes to shed 'cheeky upstart' tag and launch assault on flagships

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: No thanks

It's not even as cheap as some Samsung flagships from last year, which still beat OnePlus is most areas. SD card, waterproofing, Qi charging, better screen, better camera ARcore support. Buy the new OnePlus if you want the latest Snapdragon and more RAM than you're likely to need, and can live without a fair few features.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Bezels and notches

Replacing the a large bottom bezel with more screen means that less scrolling is required when viewing websites.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: No waterproofing?

> Not replacing a working phone every year or two also reduces waste...

Indeed. So buy a waterproof phone with specs good enough to see you through the next few years, stick it in a good case and put a tempered glass screen protector on it. Qi charging will also save your phone from landfill should your USB C port become damaged. I know USB C ports are said to be mechanically durable, but I know one bloke who got paint into it. I've also heard of a USB port being damaged due to a bit of fluff and a 9v fast charger.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why the front-facing camera hullaballoo?

> When you make the entire surface of the phone interactive, it means that merely picking up the phone interacts with it.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? However, many phones have capacitive grip sensors in the side* and use software to distinguish unintended input. The advantage of a phone with slim bezels is that if you put it into a case (so that it becomes the same size as a phone with big bezels) you gain protection - cases can be deformed without damaging the phone.

*You can see this for yourself if you can access your phone's hardware diagnostics mode. On Samsung S8 that is accessed by entering *#0*# into the dialler.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why the front-facing camera hullaballoo?

> It also ignores the functional imprortance of the bezel. It might look lovely to have a single piece of glass, a sort of infinity screen but I'd rather mine had a little more protection, including from my own fingers.

How strong is your grip?! :) I'd take the smaller bezelled phone and stick a case on it - bringing the total package up to the size of a phone with thicker bezels. If the case gets damaged, it's cheap and easy to swap out for a new one. Plus, the case allows me to choose a level of protection to suit me, and other customisations that could never practically be offered across a range of phones.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: No waterproofing?

Carry my phone in a plastic bag? It's just easier and safer to get a waterproof phone in the first place. Plenty of options from Samsung, Sony, Apple and others. And the plastic bag wouldn't help if the phone were dropped whilst it was actually being used or connected to wired headphones.

Waterproofing is good for anyone who goes hiking, camping, messing around in boats, lives in a potential flood zone (like Tewkesbury, NYC, Miami, Hiroshima..), lives in the tropics, has small children, uses their phone in the kitchen to view or time recipes, likes listening to podcasts in the bath, or is just occasionally butter-fingered. There's a lot of people who fall into at least one of those categories.

Making products durable reduces waste.

iPhone XR guts reveal sizzle of the XS without the excessive price tag

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Poor mans Pixel.

> Even iVerge had to grudgingly admit that the IphoneXS is slightly worse that the 18 month old Pixel 2

You're taking rubbish. That Verge article was by Vlad who places a lot of emphasis on cameras - and he's a big fan of the Pixel camera. He also reviews dedicated cameras for the Verge. In the past he's championed Android phones that were worthy of promotion, such as the Xperia Z3 Compact.

Dave 126 Silver badge

I'd get the yellow one and pair it with some yellow Sony Sports Walkman headphones from the 1990s via a 3.5mm jack... Oh, wait.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I still want a fingerprint reader...

https://www.biometricupdate.com/201805/apple-receives-patents-for-ultrasonic-fingerprint-sensors-and-in-display-fingerprint-system - May 2018

Of course you folk don't need reminding that an Apple patent is no guarantee of Apple implementing said patent in a shipped product.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I still want a fingerprint reader...

> Shame Apple never managed to get this [ under the screen fingerprint reader] to work, and of course, they'll now never introduce it

Apple have researched ultrasonic fingerprint scanners for use under a display - as have Samsung. This approach is faster and more secure than the camera approach that OnePlus are using, but is more expensive.

Apple may or may not use such a sensor in future - guess it depends on what they learn from their user's Face ID experiences, as well as engineering challenges to bring an ultrasonic sensor at an acceptable cost and size. Reports suggest Samsung may use an under screen ultrasonic sensor on some models, whilst a cheaper version of the upcoming Galaxy S10 'Retro' (it doesn't have a 'Edhe' curved screen) having a side-mounted conventional fingerprint scanner, a la Sony.

Apple breathes new life into MacBook Air with overhauled 2018 model

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: The Trashcan Mac Pro

New "modular" Mac Pro in 2019, according to Tim Cook a while back.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Meh. It has the same number and type of ports as a Gemini

The Gemini doesn't have Thunderbolt over its USB C ports - so, no, they're no more the same than a USB A 1.0 socket is the same as a USB 2.0 socket. Physically the same, but differing in capability.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Somewhat begs the question as to what's the point of the 13" MBP.

Most likely thermal design - the Pro can run at full pelt for longer. That said, both this new Air and the Pro can off load work into an external GPU over Thunderbolt.